Villages by John Updike (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📗

and this relationship, forged in such a summer lightning of passion and mutual discovery, is cooling to nothing, like a holiday bond between children dissolved when vacation is over. Julia, uncontacted day after day, is withering smaller and smaller, and is falling through the network, to become forever lost beneath the barren busy-ness of “normal,” licit life. Panic wakes him; Owen awakes bereft, bewildered as it slowly dawns upon him, along with the wallpaper and the merciless seaside sunlight already burning in the chink beneath the windowshade, that it is Phyllis who is lost, sunk beneath the surface of things, and that he and Julia, long and lawfully married, have been for over twenty years living together in Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts.

Among the checkpoints of Middle Falls had been the beach of imported sand at Heron Pond. Here in summers the young mothers of Owen’s acquaintance, nearing the midpoint of their three score and ten but still lovely in his eyes, took their children for an hour’s easy entertainment in the middle of the day, a quick lunch, and then home for a nap, sometimes reappearing in the shadowy afternoon, the slow time sloping toward the children’s dinner after five. Gregory, at twelve, and Iris, at ten and a half, had outgrown the tepid brown water, the tetherball on its rickety pole in the center of a circle of dust, the jackknife-initialled picnic benches and tables, the oil drums painted green and labelled TRASH, the corroded aluminum water-slide close to shore, the lifeguard chair still occupied by the principal’s straight-haired mahogany daughter, no longer a teen-ager. Her plumpness had become denser, even menacing, with a hint of mustache above the lips white with zinc oxide, and her thick legs conspicuously hairy—a statement presumably political. Among the young, hair had become an emblem; armpits flourished, boys’ ears vanished. Gregory became a mophead, a miniature Beatle, protesting haircuts as if they were a form of assault, a vaccination that would hurt. Little Floyd, a second grader, and Eve were still docile visitors to the pond; when Owen would run over there at lunch in the red Corvette Stingray he had decided, as of 1968, that he owed himself, he would come upon them and their mother as if in fresh discovery. He liked seeing his wife in a bathing suit—a white bikini that set off her pale, pinkish tan. So close to nude yet still stately, she seemed the Phyllis he had hoped for, and the whole sleepy, scruffy beach by the pond recalled a lost paradise, with its brown-legged tomboys. The mothers spread blankets on the grass and picnicked with their children, Alissa Morrissey making her usual jokes about the caloric dangers of Marshmallow Fluff. She was short enough that any extra pound showed; but something anxious, nervous, and double-edged about her whittled away and kept her plumpness in check. Her husband, Ian, was getting to be difficult, it was said. Against the trend of the times for long ironed hair, she had hers, snuff-brown with induced highlights, cut short and brushed back as if she were speeding by on a motorcycle. She wore glasses rimmed in flesh-colored plastic, even when lazing at the pond; her eyes—dull blue, abraded like much-washed denim—shifted his way, Owen thought, more than his strict share. Men were a rare sight at Heron Pond. When Alissa smiled at something he said, her smile curved to enclose him; it was as if she read his mind and knew about the murky incident with Stacey, and the clear resolution that had followed. He was available.

One night of too much to drink at the Morrisseys’ house, perhaps New Year’s Eve, in that messy tail end after midnight, they had accidentally met in the upstairs hall—she was checking on a feverish child and he on his way to urinate, the only downstairs bathroom being attached to Ian’s off-limits studio. Ian was quite humorlessly strict about his studio being off limits to company. Veering toward each other like planets out of orbit, Owen and Alissa kissed. She pushed up so hard their teeth touched; he was startled, as he had been years ago by Alice Stottlemeyer. But this was no longer spin-the-bottle. Unhinged by celebratory champagne, roused by her party outfit of see-through blouse and cerise harem pants, he slid his right hand down her side and tucked it a moment into her crotch. She jumped back as if scalded. “Oh no you don’t,” she said, in the tough voice of a dance-hall hostess, as played by Barbara Stanwyck or Ann Sheridan in a black-and-white movie at the long-lost Scheherazade. There were layers to Alissa; there were layers to all women, he was discovering; the trick was to find the layer where you were welcome.

The Morrisseys entertained a lot, a sure sign of marital distress: they needed others to help them bear each other’s company. Ian Morrissey, a decade older than Alissa, was a magazine illustrator. As the world of middle-class magazines needing illustrations shrank, he had grown glum and sarcastic. The years had given him more gray hair than a man not much over forty should have, and trembling fingers stained by ink and nicotine, and a hollow-chested slump. He had acquired the idea that, while his own professional world, of dashingly glamorized women illustrating romantic short stories that always ended well, was yielding to sensational nonfiction and photographs airbrushed to within a few hairs of pornography, Owen and Ed were riding a technological wave steadily upward. He spoke of them derisively as “nerds.” Owen tried to explain to him how volatile and chancy the rapidly changing computer world was, and how he and Ed were facing ever younger and more innovative competition, but it had settled into Ian’s ego that he embodied a dying fine-arts tradition which was being crassly smothered under an onslaught of rock music, industrial robots, and psychopathic violence. He had grown a stubby goatee that made him look unshaven and sunk in the déshabille of failure.

“What